Trent Reznor Quotes

It's kind of a miracle to think that a device in your pocket can play pretty much any song that the world has ever created.

I've become impossible, holding on to when everything seemed to matter more.

Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.

I think theres something strangely musical about noise.

Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.

I do actually believe in love. I can't say that I'm 100 percent successful in that department, but I think it's one of the few worthwhile human experiences. It's cooler than anything I can think of right now.

I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.

One of my biggest heroes and people I was fortunate enough to be around is David Bowie. I look at his career, and he always had the balls to break things that weren't broken, to step away from something and try something new, at risk of failing.

For each film, you try to create a whole world sonically, having a sense of identity through instruments used, or recording techniques.

I found that when I was putting my own music out, with my Twitter feed as the pure marketing budget, I'm preaching to the choir.

Lots of people can have girlfriends. But I can throw around guitars onstage! That'll be my epitaph: 'He never had a girlfriend, but you should've seen him smash a Les Paul!'

Balance is good, because one extreme or the other leads to misery, and I've spent a lot of my life at one of those extremes.

And when the day arrives I'll become the sky and I'll become the sea and the sea will come to kiss me for I am going home. Nothing can stop me now.

My doctor says, 'You've got one of the hardest ones to treat because it's not bipolar, it's not up and down, you're always just about a quart low in the mood department.

If you have something to say, then say it. Express yourself and break the rules.

I'll be there for you, as long as it works for me. I play a game, its called insincerity.

I'm kind of forced to get out of what might feel more natural and comfortable.

I'll name check Radiohead on this--they've done a pretty suave marketing plan on this new record. I think generally it's been a pretty cool thing, but what they've done is used those (sales) numbers in a way that they can spin them anyway they want cause you don't know what they are.

God is dead, and no one cares! If there is a hell I'll see you there!

When I was around Bowie, I was nearing the bottom. When we were touring together, I looked at him as a kind of big-brother figure and I also looked at him as somebody I had a lot of respect for. The age and the period he's at in his life, I'd like to be there some day. He has a kind of content peace about him that's something to shoot for.

I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy.

I thought I'd reached the bottom a few times, but then I'd realise there was another 30 floors of despair below that.

I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything.

Today's political climate does not allow the luxury of apathy.

Left to my own devices, in the face of the climate change deniers, the madness and the greed-based decision-making, and propaganda that's been floating around, it's hard not to become pessimistic.

Bowie mattered to me. He reinvented himself so many times - it must have been a daring statement to do that, risking failure. And hanging out with him and seeing him like that - he's my dad's age, born in the same month - when you find someone who's been through a really dark period, which most of his music I care about is from, Low, Lodger, "Heroes" era.... But he came out of it and made something that mattered.

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

I want to do something that matters.

You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.

To switch right into creativity usually takes a bit of time, and this came up right at that juncture where I thought, okay, here's an opportunity to work with somebody I really respect in a new medium.

I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.

In my life, I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far, and who says you have to stop there, and whats behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while, you get too far down in the quicksand.

Grammy asshole weekend in LA. Yuck ... The Grammys = the old guard / old media propping up their puppets trying to convince the outside world, and each other, they're relevant.

I write most of my songs when I'm in a bad mood.

I believe there's a God but I'm not too sure of his relevance.

My moral standing is lying down.

If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.

All I've undergone I will keep on.

The least responsive audience I can ever remember playing to.

I have been wildly enthused about gaming since I was younger, and a career path I chose not to go down but did really consider was getting into programming and game design.

I hated school . . . I freaking hated it. The fact is that it revolved around something you didn't have access to. If you weren't on the football team, if you were in the band, you were a leper. When people say those were the best years of our lives, I want to scream.

This isn't meant to last. This is for right now.

Books are better than movies because you design the set the way you want it to look.

I thought my goal in life was to be in a successful band, and I had got that, but I was as miserable as I had ever been, and I couldn't understand why that would be.

My music has been a sort of personal therapy. It's got me out of tough times, it has been the friend that I needed, when I didn't have a friend there.

I've got a canvas, I've got a scene, let’s fill that with sound.

I didn't want to be in a Pepsi commercial with R2-D2 sitting on my shoulder.

Being human is a lot more difficult than being on tour.